4FOXSAKE are on the cusp of releasing an album (Light The Way – Oct 4th), and have a party to celebrate on October 5th. And here they are to tell us more about why you should be excited about all this…
Simple things first – where are you guys from?
Hello Hello, we are a London-based band but none of us are actually British! Marios, our lead singer/guitarist, is from Cyprus, Elias, our drummer, is from little Brazil aka Portugal, while Augustin, our guitarist, and Micka our bass player are both from France!
How did you meet?
Marios and Elias were playing together in a band called Redwire while Augustin and Micka had met a few months prior and had started working together on a couple of projects. When Elias put up an add saying that a singer and a drummer were available and looking to form a band Micka answered it and the rest, as they say, is history.
How long have you been playing as a band?
We started sometime around October 2018, so we’re getting close to our 6 year anniversary.
Before you get sick of being asked… where does the band name come from?
We were thinking of incorporating the fact that we are all foreigners, and it’s four of us… so one of the name was 4Foreigns or 4Foreigners… anyway it was bad. But we liked the 4F logo, so we had a bit of a brainstorm session on what the F could stand for and 4FOXSAKE was born.
What are your influences?
We always cite Green Day and System of a down as our 2 biggest influences. We can also include Foo fighters, Sum 41, Metallica, Led zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden… that list could go on for quite some time
Describe your music. What makes you unique?
Green Day and System of a Down have a child… and he loves shredding guitar solos
Do you have any particular lyrical themes?
We sing about our life and what we have experienced. These are pretty depressing times for music, so a lot of our songs come across as that, but we are somehow still hopeful that we can fight and make things better.
Our songs tend to reflect that, a character facing a hard time but being resilient to come out of it. We also like to bash social media, only because as musicians we very much have a love/hate relationship with it.
What’s your live show like? How many shows have you played?
We must have played a hundred by now, when we first started, we were playing every week hosting an open jam night in Stratford, that was great for practice and testing out our songs.
Having been together for this long we can easily go 2 month without practice and then just jump on stage and play as a unit without skipping a bit… well not noticeably… it’s still rock n’ roll!
If you like what we do, consider joining us on Patreon for as little as £1 per month!
What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen or done at a live show?
We get the usual drunk jumping on stage thinking they can sing… But the wildest or most memorable happened after a show, when Marios accidentally drove over his guitar!
What kit do you use / guitars do you play / etc.?
Marios plays a Gibson Les Paul Junior Billie Joe Armstrong signature guitar, that is currently missing a knob and is a bit scratched… but works perfectly! Still, we wouldn’t recommend driving over your guitar it got us a bit worried. He used to play a lot on his Fender blues Junior amp but for ease of travel he now tends to use the Strymon iridium pedal.
Augustin being a poor left-handed player is more limited in his options, but he loves his Gibson SGJ. He runs it through is pedalboard, which includes a TC electronics MojoMojo overdrive and a MXR super badass distortion pedal, to his Orange Brent Hinds signature terror amp, which then goes into a two-note torpedo captor.
On the bass Micka plays on his 5 strings Ibanez BTB605MS which then goes through his pedalboard, that includes Darkglass compressor and microtube, to a fender bass rumble 100.
Elias has Tama Superstar classic maple 5 piece drumkit and for his cymbals he uses Zultan 14” hi hats, 16” crash, 18” crash, 18” China, 20” Ride as well as a Sabian 12” chopper and 10” B8X splash and also a Meinl 16” Extreme metal crash
What, if anything, are you plugging/promoting at the moment?
Depending on when this will be published we are or have released our first full length album! It is out on the 4th of October and is called Light the Way.
To celebrate the release, we are organising a concert a the Camden Club on the 5th October. Again, depending on the date this will be published: it was awesome! Or: You should come it’s going to be awesome!
What are your plans for the next 6 months or so?
Promote the album and play as many shows as we can!
If you were second on a three-band bill, which band would you love to be supporting and which band would you choose to open for you? A chance to plug someone you’ve toured with, or a mate’s band we’ve not heard of before!
If System ever decides to come back this side of the pond we’ll be there! There are so many that we would love to support.
As for who would open for us, we have played with a lot of talented bands… for our own gig on the 5th of October we handpicked Kill the Kid and Superfecta, two amazing bands that you should definitely check out!
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If you want to check out more new music, then fire up our Headline Act playlists on Spotify and YouTube!
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